


112. boarding school

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [251]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, boarding school itself is pretty tangential in this for a fic titled Boarding School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 22:50:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10174193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Things Sarah was expecting from boarding school: uniforms, bad classes, a lack of anything exciting.Things Sarah was not expecting from boarding school: a girl with her face breaking in to her room in the middle of the night to hold a knife to her neck.





	

It’s a last-ditch effort. Sarah is fifteen and S is tired of it – that’s what she yelled, at least, but she went on for a while and Sarah tuned most of it out. She realized, standing in the middle of an empty dorm room with a backpack (with maybe three changes of clothing and a toothbrush) and a shopping bag (filled with uniforms with the tags still on) that it might have been a mistake. Maybe she should have fought back.

But it’s too late for that now – she’s been here a few weeks, and no matter what she does they won’t kick her out. She’s nervous of going for arson, but apparently – according to the girl down the hall who trades weed for favors – that wouldn’t work anyway. Someone tried it last year. Here at Saint Whoever-the-Fuck’s Home For Wayward Girls, they don’t stand for that kind of shit.

They stand for a lot of shit, though. Every girl in this school is terrible, and did Siobhan even realize what she was getting Sarah into?

Maybe she did. Maybe she thought she did. There are a lot of things Siobhan probably wasn’t ready for, and Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night with one of them pressed to her throat.

Sarah screams, because what else do you do. There’s a knife at her throat, and a girl who looks just like her is holding it, and her hair stinks like bleach, and when Sarah keeps screaming she shoves her whole fist into Sarah’s mouth. She looks more panicked than Sarah does.

“Stop,” she says, accent strange. She sounds like bad villains from worse movies. Russian, maybe? “You aren’t supposed to scream. I am here to save you.”

Sarah bites down on the girl’s fist and she yelps, shoves it further down. Sarah gags and then releases her teeth. Above her, her twin is hyperventilating.

“You weren’t supposed to scream,” she says, like a plea. Then she says some other things, and they definitely aren’t in English.

Knock on the door. “Sarah?” calls the voice of another girl. “You okay in there?”

“Yes,” calls the girl with Sarah’s face. Her eyes go to Sarah and then away again. She loudly fake-coughs, twice. “Sick.”

Laughter outside the door, and footsteps going away again. Sarah tries to indicate with her eyebrows that she’ll be quiet if her twin takes her hand out of Sarah’s mouth, and it somehow works. Sarah groans at the crack-pop of her jaw. She can’t stop looking at the knife, gleaming in the moonlight coming through her window.

“I wasn’t supposed to find you,” says Sarah’s twin. “We didn’t know you were here. I was supposed to find the Russian copy first. But your name was on a list, of girls at school. And Maggie said she didn’t know you. She said you were special.”

She goggles. Sarah tries to shift in a way that will do – something, but she doesn’t.

“You can’t kill me,” she says soothingly. “There’re people about, yeah? You can’t – you can’t kill me.”

Her twin shrugs a shoulder. “School for delinquent girls,” she says, words falling out of her mouth like she was trained to them. “Happens. Bad girls fighting.” She grins. “Only your fingerprints on room. Who would know? Could be anybody. Not Helena.”

“Helena,” Sarah says hurriedly, before she can finish. “That – that your name?”

Helena’s face goes flat. “I have to kill you,” she says, but it sounds like she’s saying it to herself.

“You’re my sister,” Sarah says, and that was apparently the wrong thing to say, and Helena is fumbling for a pillow to press over her face and Sarah fumbles wildly, says: “You a delinquent?”

Helena stops. “I do not know meaning of this.”

“Bad,” Sarah says, instead of _you just_ said _delinquent, you have to know what it means._ “Just – real piece of shit.”

“No,” Helena says. “I am the light. I am the original.”

 _You’re full of shit_ , Sarah thinks.

“You’ve never gotten drunk?” she says. “Never – never gone dancing? Nothing?”

“No,” Helena says. “I am the light. I have mission from God.”

“Seems sad,” Sarah says. She very very slowly starts sitting up. “Just sayin’. You know there’s a bottle of bourbon under my bed. You’re gonna kill me anyways, yeah? You could at least try it, ‘fore all the blood and screaming. That’s not fun, is it.”

Helena slowly scoots off of her and watches her with wary eyes. Her hand is white-knuckled. “Drinking is sin,” she says.

“Jesus made water into wine,” Sarah says. Thank god for the terrible bullshit religious study class.

Helena seemingly doesn’t know how to respond to this. Sarah reaches under the bed and pulls out the bottle, dusty and filled to the brim with amber. She unscrews the top, takes a swig, passes it to Helena. “If God didn’t want this,” she says, “you think he woulda sent you here early? Uh – Maggie, right? She said I’m special? Maybe that’s why. Won’t know unless you try it.”

Helena frowns at her and takes the bottle, starts chugging it like apple juice. Abruptly she shudders, full-body, and dry heaves. “No,” she says. “No, poison, sin, bad.”

“Gotta get used to it,” Sarah says reasonably. She takes a small sip, offers the bottle back. Helena chugs some more. This could work, this has to work. Sarah’s whole brain is the plan, not other things. Like: she has a twin sister. Like: what is she going to do during room inspection. Like: Helena said _copies_ , like multiple. Like: she has a sister and she could die, any second, any moment, she could die.

“Oh,” Helena says, interrupting those thoughts. She’s blinking over and over again, dazzled. “Oh, _ya tse lyublyu_.”

“Me too,” Sarah says. Helena drops the knife in a clatter and drinks more. She’s laughing to herself, slurring things in maybe-Russian. Occasional words in the middle: _hurts, hurts, die._

“Cheers to that,” Sarah says. Helena slumps over and stares at her. “You right,” she says. “Special. You.” She grins, a mouthful of teeth, and slumps over even more. She looks like she’s falling asleep, like she’s that much of a lightweight. Maybe she’s got an empty stomach. God, Sarah hopes she has an empty stomach.

Helena’s eyelids flutter, and Sarah stares at her and tries to make her fall asleep. She seems like she’s on her way. She doesn’t have a knife. She drank maybe half that bottle. Her lips are twitching sleep-sweet and she’s going towards it, sleep, but not Sarah – Sarah’s heart is pounding in her throat. She has never been more awake in her life.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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